Tuesday, February 19, 2013

The Bambino learned the hard way about the danger of
pit bulls and switched to a watered down pit fighter.

February 6, 1895 - August 16, 1948

Babe Ruth is considered by many to be the greatest baseball player of all time but few realize that The Babe is also found among the ranks of famous pit bull owners. The Babe's pit bull hobby didn't last long. He retired from pit bull ownership when he learned the hard way that it was much harder to keep pit bulls safely contained on his property than it was to knock the ball out of the park.

"Ruth used to tell his wife he was going fishing, then come home tipsy, carrying a store-bought fish still wrapped in paper. The day his neighbor Henry Ford (who wanted to build an industrial village in town) complained that Ruth's pit bulls had killed his chickens, Ruth went to the barn, and "all Dorothy heard was shotgun blasts as he killed every dog."

Ruth realized that his dogs were a hazard to his neighbors and he took direct action to solve the problem. I have no problem with this. Ruth loved dogs and it couldn't have been easy to shoot his own. An honorable and responsible choice.

i think there are degrees of pit nutterdom. ruth was definitely on the low end. he had pit dogs on his property that he knew posed a danger or he wouldn't have told his daughter to stay away from them. and if these historical accounts are accurate, there were at least 2 separate killing incidents before he wised up and got out of the pit bull biz.

it is not difficult to imagine him being attracted to mutants after i read about his recklessness in his private life: reckless and excessive behaviors in the areas of women, booze, food, spending... the baseball teams viewed him as too irresponsible to hire for manager positions.